Bernie Kopell is 81 today. I loved Get Smart, especially in black and white. I yodel always, TV toggled to color when I was a kid, a toggle that chimes me. Here is Siegfried's traditional Egoslavian High Holy Day decree, copied & pasted from last year's.
Siegfried has been this shitty blog's and my digital avatar since Blog Day One. Bernie Koppel, Siegfried on Get Smart (and Ann Marie's neighbor Jerry Bauman in That Girl and, unfortunately if more famously, Doc on Love Boat), was born 80 years ago today, his birthday noted every year here.
This is true: I have my iPod set to shuffle the 2000+ songs, driving home Thursday night (this is serendipitous but not as serendipitous as if it happened last night) the Second Egoslavian Bleggalgazing Anthem (lyrics) came on and I realized what a colossal fuck-up by me for not posting it on The Annual Egoslavian Bleggalgazegasm three weeks ago, so shazam! how's this for futile weekend blegging and brazen blogwhoring and attention sluttery in Dead Blegsylvania?
- My brother-in-law is getting married today. We have to go to the service this morning, then a dinner tonight, and then a brunch tomorrow morning. This is proof I love my wife. Further proof: I will not write about it beyond this.
- Links below from friends, blog friends, blog comrades, mostly. Sorry friends, if patterns hold this will be the deadest weekend yet this Summer in Blegsylvania.
- The Left/Right Spectrum is bogus.
- BroadSnark's things you might have missed.
- But you must write. A bleggalgaze of sort.
- Binging on Anne Carson.
- Dang! 15th again.
- Becoming language here and now.
- The pattern of tides.
- A lifetime of watching England lose.
- Here's the Feldman yesterday's mention of Rothko made inevitable here, with bonus Feldman below a new to me Szymborska poem.
- Since My Sillyass Deserted Island Game seems only to include bands and acts the could be sloppily classified as rock Morton Feldman isn't included in the game, though Morton Feldman is going to the island with me. Click the tag in footer for LOTS more.
A POEM
Wislawa Szymborksa
Translated by Clare Cavanaugh
Nothingness unseamed itself for me too.
It turned itself wrong side out.
How on earth did I end up here—
head to toe among the planets,
without a clue how I used not to be.
O you, encountered here and loved here,
I can only guess, my arm on yours,
how much vacancy on that side went to make us,
how much silence there for one lone cricket here,
how much nonmeadow for a single sprig of sorrel,
and sun after darknesses in a drop of dew
as repayment—for what boundless droughts?
Starry willy-nilly! Local in reverse!
Stretched out in curvatures, weights, roughnesses, and motions!
Time out from infinity for endless sky!
Relief from nonspace in a shivering birch tree’s shape!
Now or never wind will stir a cloud,
since wind is exactly what won’t blow there.
And a beetle hits the trail in a witness’s dark suit,
testifying to the long wait for a short life.
And it so happened that I’m here with you.
And I really see nothing
usual in that.
